“romantic comedy (and its television variations) devotes its energies to obscuring the possible gaps between things like companionability, attraction, and intense sexual arousal. Hannah’s is also a situation that would be impossible to depict without a graphic sex scene, and offers a clear example of what sex scenes are good for. If all you want to do is convey an erotic tension between two people, you can leave out explicit depictions of sex acts. But if you are interested in the psychological implications of what happens between people during sex, you need to show something of the sex.” — On Lena Dunham’s depiction of sexual encounters in Girls. The Loves of Lena Dunham by Elaine Blair | The New York Review of Books
“Zappa albums valorise the idea of virtuoso instrumentalists and guitar heroes (or rather, Jean Luc Ponty, Terry Bozzio and Steve Vai) to a point which is beyond parody, however. We were always meant to worship these people, make no mistake about it. (You can never get through any piece on Zappa without certain giveaway buzz phrases cropping up: “chops”, “seamless virtuosity”, “modal run”, “great studio sound”, etc.) This is, in essence, as un-rock or un-subversive as music can get, in a way that Terry Riley or Morton Feldman or John Cage, say, never were: this is all about how fast your fingers can go. … And how low your sarcasm can dredge.” — The Wire pulling no punches on reviewing Zappa’s oeuvre. Frank Zappa: Don’t do that on stage anymore
“Balancing on minor chord darkness and major chord triumphs somewhere between “Sister Ray” and 1969-era Michael Ratledge, Bernie Worrell’s distorted and overdriven keyboard melody line swells as the band approach the ripped open jugular of funk honey currently oozing and koozing outward.” — Seth prepares the uninitiated for psychedelic freedom on Funkadelic’s classic “Free your mind…” Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | Unsung | The Book of Seth | Funkadelic - Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
“In 1960 He was my friend Robbie Robinson, going to University of Maryland, we hung out together, taught each other folk guitar licks. In College park we just toted guitars around looking for folk jams. We were both heavily into 12-string. For I while I didn’t feel complete with out a 12-string and a harmonica rig. He was very high strum, eager, anxious, intense, and had a bit of an inferiority complex. He sweated. Later in California he changed his name, played rolling triplets, lived near the ocean with two gorgeous Asian women and practiced Tai Chi.” — Max Ochs discusses Robbie Basho Max Ochs : Answers some questions from the producer
Blackest Ever Black is issuing Flaming Tunes on vinyl. About time.
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I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.
The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.
There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.
Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.
” — Steve Albini responds to a question about downloading music. I am Steve Albini, ask me anything : IAmA
“God was dead. The time and cause of death were variously given in sophomore and senior surveys of western civilization—disemboweled by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, assassinated in eighteenth-century Paris by agents of the French Enlightenment, lost at sea in 1835 while on a voyage with Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, garroted by Friedrich Nietzsche on a Swiss Alp in the autumn of 1882, disappeared into the nuclear cloud ascending from Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The assisting coroners attached to one or another of the history faculties submitted densely footnoted autopsy reports, but none of the lab work brought forth a thumbprint of the deceased.” — Lewis Lapham on the “leap of faith” Mandates of Heaven - Lapham’s Quarterly
“the strength to confront suffering was to be found in the thought that “you will not die because you are sick but because you are alive.” —
On the unknown and unknowable in the practice of medicine.
The God in the Machine - Lapham’s Quarterly
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Somewhere
Behind Türkenfeld a spruce nursery a pond in the moor on which the March ice is slowly melting
” — The Book Bench: W. G. Sebald’s Poetry of the Disregarded : The New Yorker